Jan Rice’s Reviews > Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity > Status Update
Jan Rice
is on page 111 of 392
Have now caught up with where I'd left off + finished one additional chapter. Overall theme is that the early Rabbis (of Rabbinical Judaism) and the proto-orthodox Church colluded in creating a theological difference where no clear one had existed. Ideas about "Christianity" splitting off from "Judaism," leaving "Jewish Christians" behind or even of "Jewish, Christian, Pagan" are anachronistic, simplistic & wrong.
— Mar 19, 2022 06:28PM
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Jan’s Previous Updates
Jan Rice
is finished
Hope I don't take as long before I review as I did for Conservatism! -- Don't think I will.
— Jul 20, 2022 08:06PM
Jan Rice
is on page 86 of 392
Resumed reading but had to backtrack and have not yet made it up to the point I'd reached. Slow going. A couple pages per day. We're reading it out loud at dinner. :) (Had quit to finish the book on political conservatism and then read The Overstory, so it had been a while.)
— Feb 21, 2022 05:50PM
Jan Rice
is on page 86 of 392
Had made it to the end of Part I (P. 86) when stopped to read something else. Now taking it back up, which involves backtracking. This is a tough one, but exciting.
— Jan 20, 2022 07:54PM
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Jan-Maat
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Mar 20, 2022 12:18AM
Is there much early Rabbinical writing?
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Not like that. At least not straight Rabbinical writing. The early part is looking at Pirkei Avot on the Jewish side and Justin Martyr's Dialogue w/Trypho on the Christian side. (If Boyarin were writing what I just wrote, he'd probably have "Jewish" and "Christian" in quotes b/c they weren't, yet. In that early part he's showing how Christianity created the concept of "religion" as a quality carried by an individual, apart from an ethnic group. Then he's showing how for a short while (couple of centuries?) Judaism went along, then reverted to being a "way" rather than a religion or "faith," as now understood. Then he gets into how they each in parallel created the concept of "heresy" in order to say who was in & who was out. They invented a difference, and the difference was theological. (Hence the title: Border Liines) According to the Greek way, heresis was a school of thought. Was still that way when Josephus was writing. Only toward the end of the 2nd century did we get "heresy," as now understood. The chapter we just finished had to do w/Logos theology. Focused on the 1st 14 verses of the 4th Gospel (Prologue) and put forth the argument that only in verse 14 does the Christian version of embodiment occur. The earlier based on widespread thought at the time and he says totally non-Christian Jewish. Good arguments. Heavy duty footnotes. Slow going. If sounds fascinating to you, get this book.P.S. I had earlier seen a portion of his Logos argument elsewhere and resented it. So the earlier part of the book is essential.
